Illinoisans who want housing abundance…it’s time to submit “witness slips” (they’re kind of like petitions and they’re seen by Illinois State Representatives and Senators. This whole process will take less than 5 minutes, including the time it takes to watch this video tutorial I made.
Fill out the witness slips! Because you pre-registered your contact information will already be filled in. If you’re representing yourself, enter “self” in the three fields (firm, title, and groups represented in this appearance). Then select the “create slip” button. (See annotated screenshot below.)
Repeat the process for all of the witness slips you want to support (or oppose).
You’re done!
Screenshot showing the witness slip form (which is prefilled because I have a My ILGA account); the checkboxes are annotated to show which ones to select.
The Chicago zoning code requires nearly every development, new or renovated, to provide on-site car parking. The code also provides relief from that requirement, most often in the form of cutting the requirement in half if the development is in a “transit served location”. Further relief – getting closer to zero parking spaces required – can be requested via administrative adjustment to the Chicago Zoning Administrator. (Learn about other methods of relief from Chicago’s parking mandates.)
Sometimes, however, that administrative adjustment must be converted to an application for variation that’s heard by the Zoning Board of Appeals (ZBA).
Pete Snyder and I tabulated all of the requests for parking relief – by way of a variation application – heard by the ZBA from January 2022 through January 2025.
Here’s what we found in that 37-month period:
There were 73 applications for parking relief (an average of two per ZBA meeting).
A little more than half of the applications (39) explicitly mentioned the development being in a transit-served location.
Those 73 applications requested relief from having to provide 661 car parking spaces.
At $10,000 per surface parking space that reflects a savings of about $6.6 million in construction costs.
Assuming all spaces would be on the ground, this is the equivalent of 3.5 acres of land which does not need to be acquired or if already acquired can be used for other purposes. Bell Park in Dunning is approximately 3.5 acres.
Each applicant pays $500 for the 72 variations and one applicant paid a $1,000 application fee for their special use.
Most applicants hired and paid an attorney to handle their application. Lawyer fees vary and are not made known to the public, but for variations are usually multiple thousands of dollars. Lawyers typically charge more for special use applications.
Google Maps aerial photo of Bell Park
Understanding how much relief from costly parking mandates is incomplete if we only study variations. The default method, at least for locations within transit-served areas, is to ask for an administrative adjustment, which has a lower bar of obtaining approval – but we don’t have data about the number of these. Another way to get parking relief is to apply for a rezoning and bundle the relief request within that application; data on that is forthcoming.
Follow the parking reform advocacy work in Chicago by visiting these websites:
There are 110 Walgreens in Chicago that are mapped in OpenStreetMap. If a bunch of Walgreens stores are going to close after the company’s acquisition by a private equity firm called Sycamore Partners, what would the redevelopment potential be?
Two one-story Walgreens stores with large parking lots in Chicago.
For this analysis I located all 110 Walgreens using a filter in Chicago Cityscape, enabled the real estate data platform’s housing calculator to estimate the number of dwelling units allowed at each location. Then, manually, I removed the stores that were inside larger buildings leaving behind the strip mall-style locations – and a couple of standalone locations without parking lots (like this one in Lincoln Park).
Topline number: the Chicago zoning map is currently set so that if all of the one-story Walgreens stores were converted to housing approximately 3,642 homes could be built.
According to Will Loux, who advises on investing in “triple net” (NNN) leased properties, “Redeveloping these properties in the near term could be challenging due to the nature of the leases Walgreens signs. The leases tend to be long term NNN leases meaning the landlord collects rent while Walgreens is responsible for the majority of the costs associated with property ownership (taxes, insurance, and maintenance), giving the landlord little incentive to negotiate an early termination of the lease even if there are higher and better uses.”
Walgreens stores in Chicago are generally all the same size, with roughly the same size parking lots. But the zoning districts that have been applied to these properties range widely, with some stores allowing over 200 homes and others allowing 9 or 10 homes. Not every property can be expected to be redeveloped in a given year so higher zoning capacities for new housing should be well-distributed across a neighborhood and across a city.
Notes
It’s not a perfect analysis; some Walgreens parking lots are shared with other businesses (like the one at 7510 N Western Ave, where the entire strip mall is zoned to allow 267 homes), and I don’t know how much of that area should be “assigned” to the Walgreens store’s zoning capacity. While some, like 7510 N Western Ave and 3000 S Halsted St, might overestimate the number of homes allowed, there are also some that have an underestimate of homes allowed.
Another example is 1500 W Wilson Ave, where there is a Walgreens store and a Staples store which are owned by the same entity and share a parking lot. Excluding the shared parking lot the Walgreens could be converted to 16 homes and including the shared parking lot the Walgreens could be converted to 41 homes.
Galaxy brain take: including the shared parking lot and the Staples store, the Walgreens could be converted to 89 homes. For the purpose of my analysis I used the 16 homes number.
Probably the single best redevelopment opportunity is the Walgreens next to the Sheridan Red Line station, which is currently zoned to allow 97 homes. A future redevelopment could even include a rebuilt pharmacy and convenience store.
At least two two-story Walgreens store were included:
Steven’s note: I originally drafted this post in December 2016, for Transitland (my contract employer at the time). Here’s the original (archived) post on Transitland’s website.
Photo of a Russian-built tram in Saint Petersburg by Hans-Rudolf Stoll.
We [TransitLand] recently added the feed for surface transit in Saint Petersburg, Russia. ORGP is the transport organizer’s name in the Latin alphabet. ORGP website is a central source of information for the various municipally- and privately-operated ferry, bus, and tram routes.
St. Petersburg (SPb) also has trolley bus routes, which drive using electricity they collect from an overhead wire. These buses can only deviate from their route where an intersection between wires is available.
There are 1,066 routes in the SPb feed.
5 ferry routes
48 tram routes
51 trolley bus routes
Remaining are bus routes using conventional buses.
I couldn’t find ridership information for these routes, but the statistics on the Wikipedia article say that a much higher proportion of SPb residents ride the subway each weekday than people in Chicago ride the ‘L’ in my hometown. The ‘L’ runs mostly on elevated track, but has some subway and at-grade sections.
Speaking of the subway in SPb, we don’t have their GTFS feed yet and we could use your help. If you know the URL to the SPb’s subway feed, submit it on this form.
The Transitland connection
One of the features in Mapzen’s new Mobility Explorer, launched in late November, is to drill down into the transit routes, stops, and operators in a city – all of that data is based on what’s available in Transitland. It visualizes this data quickly and easily; think of it as an expansion of what Transitland’s Playground does.
Once you’re in Mobility Explorer, search for “Saint Petersburg, Russia” and click on the result. On the left sidebar, click on “show routes” and you’ll see that all of the routes in SPb will appear in the same color.
Click “style by: mode” to distinguish the subway, ferry, bus, and trolley bus routes in different colors.
A great feature of Mobility Explorer is that it tells you the Transitland API call to get the data in the current map view. You’ll find this link under the main “Show [xyz]” buttons in the left sidebar.
It’s very common see regular length buses with three doors in Europe, while buses in North America often have two doors. Articulated buses often have 3-4 doors, 1-2 more than their counterparts in the United States.
Now that I’ve audited the Chicago building permits for the last four years I can more accurately visualize where new homes were permitted across Chicago’s fifty wards. I was not surprised to see that the 27th Ward carries the team known as City Council, but I was surprised by how big the gap was between the first and second place wards, and the gap between the fewest number of wards where 50 percent of new homes were permitted and the number of wards where the other half were permitted.
In the period 2022-2024…
24.0 percent of new homes were permitted in the 27th Ward
10.6 percent in the 34th Ward
8.1 percent in the 3rd Ward
6.9 percent in the 4th Ward
Those four wards comprise 49.5 percent of new homes permitted, while 46 wards permitted the remaining 50.5 percent. Some of this imbalance is due to how different alderpersons accept new development proposals, and the current zoning capacity of properties in each ward.
Incredibly, when rounding to the tenths place, 24 wards permitted so few new homes in that time period that they round down to 0 percent.
To further illustrate how some wards are where so few new homes are permitted, which may be due to factors beyond the alderperson’s control (local rents not meeting development and construction costs, and racism, to name a couple), consider that six wards permitted fewer than 10 homes each during that three-year period.
While Chicago does not have quotas or goals on how many new homes should be permitted or built either citywide or by ward, the city will maintain a housing shortage if most wards are not facilitating or allowing new housing to be built. The allowance of new housing is heavily influenced by each alderperson’s choices.
The city’s ability to grow and spread the property tax revenue burden fairly depends on new development occurring across the city. This is especially the case in areas where new housing can moderate rising demand housing costs, and transportation infrastructure and amenities are in good supply.
Map 1. Chicago’s 50 wards and their share of new homes permitted in 2022-2024. Tap or click the map to enlarge it. Open the spreadsheet containing data that powers this map.
Other statistics
Table 1. New construction homes permitted, by year
2022
2023
2024
Total
7,574
4,498
4,360
16,432
Methodology
Using Chicago Department of Building permits that are imported to Chicago Cityscape’s Building Permits Browser, I review each new construction permit’s description to count the number of units authorized by that permit. Foundation phases of multi-phase permits and most revision permits are excluded. I do my best to catch projects that change scope between two permits, such as a permit originally issued for a two-flat but changed to a single-family house, or a larger multifamily building losing or gaining units in a subsequent permit.
New construction coach house units are also excluded because they are allowed only in five pilot areas in a subset of wards; view ADU statistics on Chicago Cityscape.
The statistics are also shown in Chicago Cityscape’s building permits analysis table, which is updated daily; look for columns with a heading that says the year and the word “audited”. Data for permits in other years are not yet reviewed and corrected.
This is an imperfect comparison of wards because there was a redrawing of ward boundaries and an election in 2023. This means that some alderpersons are new, and that all alderpersons oversaw new development approvals and the capacity of their zoning map in different areas before and after the remap.
On the flip side, the new ward map also means that the number of inhabitants in each ward was roughly equal at the time of the remap. This supports some level of data normalization (i.e. new homes permitted per capita), which can be done in future analysis.